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Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Pr

by yashg 4y ago

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain, web3, crypto, NFT, DeFi, DAO ecosystem is a massive ponzi scheme. The proponents keep cooking up new buzzwords to keep the pot boiling and to attract new starry eyed idiots who will bring in real money into the system to keep the ponzi going. Blockchain is a hammer in search of nail. A solution for problems that do not exist.

httptoolkit 4y ago
> A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless Not at all - it's a verifiable audit log. Git is an example of exactly this.
- yashg 4y ago
  Git is not a blockchain. An audit log doesn't need to be blockchain. The whole point of blockchain is that is is decentralized, trust-less and permission-less. You take it away and what is left?
  - FabHK 4y ago
    That is largely an issue of nomenclature, but there is a school of thought that distinguishes between public, open, trust-less blockchains (which then need a consensus mechanism), and private, permissioned blockchains (which have a central authority and thus don't need a consensus mechanism). Whether the latter has many use cases is a good question, but git certainly fits the definition.
FabHK 4y ago
I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    I think maybe "valuable" meant "scalable" or something? I can't speak for the OP though. I think there's something to the idea of some proof of an efficiency-security tradeoff or lack thereof though. Seems like something that should be out there in the literature.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      With “Valuable” I meant that a lot of value is on-chain (in terms of market cap or transactions - basically whatever makes it worth stealing it). Nobody would bother mounting an attack on some random shitcoin, so it can be secure (for all practical purposes) without wasting massive amounts of energy. A public blockchain that carries a lot of value must burn a significant proportion of available hash power to guard against interference, so it’s either wasteful or insecure.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        That makes sense, but I still don't think you want "valuable." In practice, most of the value of real economic systems is not held in money, but in assets. In the crypto universe, Bitcoin is more of an asset than a currency (although a valueless one if you don't consider it a currency). All you need now is a good currency.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
    From my economics training, Money needs to have all 3 of the following characteristics. 1. A medium of transfer 2. A unit of account 3. A store of value Cryptocurrency generally does well on the first and not at the others.
InfiniteRand 4y ago
I’m not sure any efficient use for cheap energy is going to be less destructive than blockchain
gregwebs 4y ago
Where did you get the notion that the energy usage is planet destroying? Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
- yashg 4y ago
  Please. This one is not even up for debate. Crypto mining is a waste of electricity.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    Yes it is. I have a friend who thinks heating his apartment in winter is a waste. He puts on a lot of layers, drinks warm beverages, and exercises to keep warm.
- FabHK 4y ago
  > Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity. That is significant, given that the main value is to make a few miners rich ($50m a day). > and won’t increase too much. The energy usage (more precisely: the amount of money spent on energy and electro waste) is roughly proportional to BTC price, I posit (until the next halving), and so would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically (like 100x, as Peter Thiel suggested at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami recently).
  - gregwebs 4y ago
    > I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity Where did you get that figure? If you read the researched article I linked, the estimate is around 0.1%. > would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically Not as dramatically as you think: if BTC goes up to 1 million per coin it will still be using less than 1% of global energy consumption (again relying on the article I previously cited as my source). 1% is no longer a rounding error that we can just dismiss, but a price of 1 million per coin would imply that Bitcoin-based financial systems have become incredibly valuable and are displacing other financial systems.
baby 4y ago
Your comment goes in all directions so it’s hard to answer. Perhaps it’s useful to point that proof of work is not ubiquitously used in blockchains and much greener alternatives have been preferred in pretty much any crypto that’s been released in the past 5 years
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Proof of work is still what powers the vast majority of block chains by value. Perhaps if ETH goes to PoS in some future this will change, but until then, all of the big permission-less crypto curencies are proof of work.
  - baby 4y ago
    We’re talking about what the technology can do, not what the bottom of the tech is not doing
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Sure, but those alternatives are not yet proven technologies. It's unclear for example if PoS is actually trust-worthy at scale, and we can't use Bitcoin or Ethereum's success so far to check that.
      - baby 4y ago
        What makes you say that? PoS coins have been running without issues for almost as long as PoW coins and as far as I know there’s been no attacks. On the other hand there’s been many 51% attacks on PoW coins.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        No major PoS coin (well, Ripple is PoS, but centralized in other ways) exists, so it may be that they haven't been attacked simply because they are too small.
dmantis 4y ago
I moved the whole fortune out of Russia with that "speculative gambling tokens", while both Putin's regime and outside world tried to cut out russians of the possibility to move their money out of dictatorship control (almost any payment systems are now banned for russians). Maybe that's not that obvious from some first-world countries perspective, but money with enforced property right over any governments decisions is pretty much important. Some people gambling in NFTs, sitting in developed countries. Others try to save their life's work from thiefs, wars, inflation and other things. Your view depends on what you crowd in.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tasuki 4y ago
  Good for you. Also, taking your money elsewhere is imo a valid way to hinder the Putin regime.
_5uxp 4y ago
What exactly is fiat based financial system to you? Can you say it's abs. not a ponzi scheme for baby boomers and corporate America? Because I can't. It's wealth oppur. destrying system only to create wealth for certain age group with assets and their friends. Millennials and newer gener. are out of most of the "real "financial oppr. by design. So they create their system. It's that simple.
- yashg 4y ago
  I suggest you read about history of money. How it came to be, why humans needed money and what all things have been used as money and why eventually we ended up with money being issued by a sovereign (by a fiat). Then read up on the history of banking. The idea of cryptocurrency and its underlying ideology goes against the fundamental principles of finance and economics that have evolved naturally over past thousands of years ever since humans stopped being hunter gatherers.
  - _5uxp 4y ago
    Yes but "crypto" is also can be put under entire new asset class. It's slowly growing along with fiat based financial system.

by yashg 4y ago

httptoolkit 4y ago

> A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless Not at all - it's a verifiable audit log. Git is an example of exactly this.

yashg 4y ago
Git is not a blockchain. An audit log doesn't need to be blockchain. The whole point of blockchain is that is is decentralized, trust-less and permission-less. You take it away and what is left?
- FabHK 4y ago
  That is largely an issue of nomenclature, but there is a school of thought that distinguishes between public, open, trust-less blockchains (which then need a consensus mechanism), and private, permissioned blockchains (which have a central authority and thus don't need a consensus mechanism). Whether the latter has many use cases is a good question, but git certainly fits the definition.

FabHK 4y ago

I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.
- derbOac 4y ago
  I think maybe "valuable" meant "scalable" or something? I can't speak for the OP though. I think there's something to the idea of some proof of an efficiency-security tradeoff or lack thereof though. Seems like something that should be out there in the literature.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    With “Valuable” I meant that a lot of value is on-chain (in terms of market cap or transactions - basically whatever makes it worth stealing it). Nobody would bother mounting an attack on some random shitcoin, so it can be secure (for all practical purposes) without wasting massive amounts of energy. A public blockchain that carries a lot of value must burn a significant proportion of available hash power to guard against interference, so it’s either wasteful or insecure.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      That makes sense, but I still don't think you want "valuable." In practice, most of the value of real economic systems is not held in money, but in assets. In the crypto universe, Bitcoin is more of an asset than a currency (although a valueless one if you don't consider it a currency). All you need now is a good currency.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  From my economics training, Money needs to have all 3 of the following characteristics. 1. A medium of transfer 2. A unit of account 3. A store of value Cryptocurrency generally does well on the first and not at the others.

InfiniteRand 4y ago

I’m not sure any efficient use for cheap energy is going to be less destructive than blockchain

gregwebs 4y ago

Where did you get the notion that the energy usage is planet destroying? Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

yashg 4y ago
Please. This one is not even up for debate. Crypto mining is a waste of electricity.
- tasuki 4y ago
  Yes it is. I have a friend who thinks heating his apartment in winter is a waste. He puts on a lot of layers, drinks warm beverages, and exercises to keep warm.
FabHK 4y ago
> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity. That is significant, given that the main value is to make a few miners rich ($50m a day). > and won’t increase too much. The energy usage (more precisely: the amount of money spent on energy and electro waste) is roughly proportional to BTC price, I posit (until the next halving), and so would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically (like 100x, as Peter Thiel suggested at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami recently).
- gregwebs 4y ago
  > I'd say that BTC + ETC use up about 1% of world electricity Where did you get that figure? If you read the researched article I linked, the estimate is around 0.1%. > would go up dramatically if BTC went up dramatically Not as dramatically as you think: if BTC goes up to 1 million per coin it will still be using less than 1% of global energy consumption (again relying on the article I previously cited as my source). 1% is no longer a rounding error that we can just dismiss, but a price of 1 million per coin would imply that Bitcoin-based financial systems have become incredibly valuable and are displacing other financial systems.

baby 4y ago

Your comment goes in all directions so it’s hard to answer. Perhaps it’s useful to point that proof of work is not ubiquitously used in blockchains and much greener alternatives have been preferred in pretty much any crypto that’s been released in the past 5 years

tsimionescu 4y ago
Proof of work is still what powers the vast majority of block chains by value. Perhaps if ETH goes to PoS in some future this will change, but until then, all of the big permission-less crypto curencies are proof of work.
- baby 4y ago
  We’re talking about what the technology can do, not what the bottom of the tech is not doing
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Sure, but those alternatives are not yet proven technologies. It's unclear for example if PoS is actually trust-worthy at scale, and we can't use Bitcoin or Ethereum's success so far to check that.
    - baby 4y ago
      What makes you say that? PoS coins have been running without issues for almost as long as PoW coins and as far as I know there’s been no attacks. On the other hand there’s been many 51% attacks on PoW coins.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        No major PoS coin (well, Ripple is PoS, but centralized in other ways) exists, so it may be that they haven't been attacked simply because they are too small.

dmantis 4y ago

I moved the whole fortune out of Russia with that "speculative gambling tokens", while both Putin's regime and outside world tried to cut out russians of the possibility to move their money out of dictatorship control (almost any payment systems are now banned for russians). Maybe that's not that obvious from some first-world countries perspective, but money with enforced property right over any governments decisions is pretty much important. Some people gambling in NFTs, sitting in developed countries. Others try to save their life's work from thiefs, wars, inflation and other things. Your view depends on what you crowd in.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tasuki 4y ago
Good for you. Also, taking your money elsewhere is imo a valid way to hinder the Putin regime.

_5uxp 4y ago

What exactly is fiat based financial system to you? Can you say it's abs. not a ponzi scheme for baby boomers and corporate America? Because I can't. It's wealth oppur. destrying system only to create wealth for certain age group with assets and their friends. Millennials and newer gener. are out of most of the "real "financial oppr. by design. So they create their system. It's that simple.

yashg 4y ago
I suggest you read about history of money. How it came to be, why humans needed money and what all things have been used as money and why eventually we ended up with money being issued by a sovereign (by a fiat). Then read up on the history of banking. The idea of cryptocurrency and its underlying ideology goes against the fundamental principles of finance and economics that have evolved naturally over past thousands of years ever since humans stopped being hunter gatherers.
- _5uxp 4y ago
  Yes but "crypto" is also can be put under entire new asset class. It's slowly growing along with fiat based financial system.